VHS Footage Gets Synthesized in Midday Veil’s “Cages”

If there were ever an ideal audiovisual collaboration between synth geeks, it would probably be the extremely long-shot that is Boards of Canada meeting Logan Owlbeemoth’s psychedelic Tachyons+ analog video synthesizers.

Thankfully, we get something every bit as good in Owlbeemoth’s languidly-paced analog video psychedelia for Seattle experimental rock band Midday Veil’s beautifully Krautrockish “Cages,” off the band’s This Wilderness album (Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records). The song features synths by David Golightly that sound like drugged-out Tangerine Dream, and vocals by Emily Pothast that evoke Little Dragon’s song “Feather,” all of which pair well with the visual wizardy.

Owlbeethmoth tells The Creators Project that he made the video using an analog video feedback system involving a Tachyons+ analog video synthesizer and vision mixer, which he himself handcrafted. The video features a VHS source of the band in various scenes fed into this equipment, then and and out in what he describes as a “psychedelic looped-out setting.”

“It represents an analogic form of animation—the electronics are breathing,” Owlbeemoth explains. “[It’s] science like, analog all. No computer post besides editing. All the work is done pre-computer.”

Owlbeemoth likes the hands-experience of twiddling knobs, switches, and button layouts, which he finds more intuitive than the digital realm’s image-making presets. Not that he finds digital useless—in his opinion, it’s simply better to blend the two, but with a higher percentage of it carried out with analog hardware.

“You can almost smell the scene with VHS tape based work, [whereas] digital washes out all the imperfections of real life and clarifies to a possible false memory,” he says. “It’s hard to tell anymore what is reality in the A.I. smartphone clone life of modern Earth. In the jungle of this madness, we seek thrifts and alleys in search of that lost depth of ancient visual capturing. We find it in ghosts of rental tapes and half working camcorders that our parents threw away.”

“My recent experiments involve that exact described alchemy of media wrangling,” Owlbeemoth adds. “It also reminds me of my friends daily discovering new ways of making video art using dead forms and blending them with digital apps. Blending the analog to digital is key to the madness of making images.”

“Cages” is off Midday Veil’s This Wilderness, which you can order on Bandcamp via Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records.